Breast Enlargement Surgery – When Breast Implants Become Infected

Hello. My name is Adrian Richards. I’m a plastic and cosmetic surgeon and the Surgical Director of Aurora Clinics which is based here in the United Kingdom. Today I’m going to be talking you through an operation on an unfortunate lady who went to Turkey to have a breast augmentation and uplift procedure which unfortunately became infected.

Here is the picture when I first saw here. You can see that on the vertical incision on the left side she’s got an open granulating wound, which we initially suspected might be due to an infected stitch.

Here you can see the close up. There’s some granulating dead breast tissue at the base of the incision here. We initially treated it with dressings, but unfortunately it soon became evident that the implant was lying right under the incision there and was exposed.

That’s the implant. You can see me just probing there. When the implant is exposed like this, we have no option but to remove it because it won’t heal on its own.

This is at surgery. I’m just probing the area here just to confirm that the hole does communicate with the whole cavity overlying the implant. There’s quite a lot of fluid around the implant which I’ll send for analysis.

I’ve just extended the incision a little bit to allow me to get the implant out intact. As you can see, I want to leave the incision as small as possible to allow me to get the implant out.

The implant is a smooth walled implant. It actually was lying upside down there. I don’t know whether you noticed that the back plate was facing anteriorly. Cleaning the area up, the implant’s in good condition, intact but obviously has been infected. You can see around here I’m just looking around the cavity here.

The next stage is really just to clean everything out as much as possible. I’m just cleaning the cavity out with a curette here, so just removing any dead tissue, any infected material from around the implant. The next stage will be to really give everything a really good wash out. I do that with one to two litres of saline hopefully to clean any bugs out.

Here I am just removing a bit of dead material from the capsule. I remove as much dead tissue as necessary. I can’t close the incision because it’s infected. I need it to heal from the bottom. So what I’m going to do is just pack it lightly with this betadine wick. This will be changed every couple of days allowing the incision and the cavity to close from below. I would anticipate this will take three or four weeks to heal, and when it has, I’ll be able to do a further breast augmentation after approximately three to four months.

I hope you found this video informative. It’s an unfortunate case. Infection can occur following these operations. Obviously, we need to take every measure to reduce it as much as possible. If you’d like any more information about this or any other procedure, please contact us either via the website or by our number. Thank you for watching.